Join the Forum Cult. All you have to do is post in this thread to join the cult, even if you didn't want to join it. You could write a conversation starter to trick someone into posting on this thread. Then they become cult. The goal is to get as many cult members as possible.Cult Members: 71. SDK2. Whizbang3. mpolo4. SPACKlick5. Neil_Boekend6. zabing127. That one mod who locked this thread on this other forum.8. Moody7277Hey, now that I'm done playing a joke, Since I wasn't actually serious, how do you calculate the chances of winning a game?

Comparison to past games. A 5 player 1-mafia setup is 50/50. A 9 player 2-mafia setup is 50/50. An 11 or 12 player 3-mafia setup is 50/50. Those are vanilla setups, so add some power roles for balance if you deviate from that. The rest is just guessing and making sure that every faction has a reasonable chance of winning.

SDK wrote:Comparison to past games. A 5 player 1-mafia setup is 50/50. A 9 player 2-mafia setup is 50/50. An 11 or 12 player 3-mafia setup is 50/50. Those are vanilla setups, so add some power roles for balance if you deviate from that. The rest is just guessing and making sure that every faction has a reasonable chance of winning.

I find that you can do a pretty good calculation by first off assuming random voting, random non mafia NK, Random protections etc. Then there's a fudge factor because more days=more town information so for each town member per day there's a 2-3% swing higher for watchers/trackers/cops etc. Lower for naive cops even lower for paranoid or insane cops(until they get their intel flipped). For games up to about 11 it tends to work over that the fudge factors are a little off.

Past game performance is fine as long as it is recent performance among the same cult of players. However comparing mafiascum stats to TT stats to XKCD stats the numbers are significantly different for the power roles and slightly different for pure numbers.

3:1 is a good baseline, but you have to make sure that one faction won't lose too quickly. For example, a four person game with one mafia would be bad - town loses after just one mislynch. On the flip side, in a large game, that might result in too few mafia. For example, a 20 player game with a 3:1 ratio would need 5 mafia, right? However, that allows the town four mislynches, losing on the fifth, which should make the game favour town quite heavily.

My rule of thumb is to allow the town two mislynches, losing on the third, but that only works for medium sized games, 16 players and under (with 16 players, that's 5 mafia, which probably favours the mafia slightly). I don't have much experience with games larger than that, but I suspect that anything more than three allowed mislynches should favour the town, so that's 6 mafia for a 20 player game. The spoiler below is where I'd start with any game, but power roles quickly mess this up.

Often, as the mafia numbers go up, you will end up splitting the anti-town into mafia, SK, werewolves etc. That can allow a few more bad guys without hosing town, as well, upping the net bad guy chances, if not the chances for any one particular bad guy group.

Right so, I answer to all of it, I found this:Mafia is a complicated game to model, so most analysis of optimal play has assumed both (a) that there are only townsfolk and mafiosos, and (b) that the townsfolk never have a probability of identifying the Mafia that is better than chance. Early treatment of the game concentrated on simulation, while more recent studies have tried to derive closed-form equilibrium solutions for perfect play.In 2006, the computer scientists Braverman, Etesami and Mossel proved that without detectives and with perfect players the randomized strategy is optimal for both citizens and mafia. They showed that when there is a large number of players to give both groups similar probability of winning, the initial number of mafiosi m need to be proportional to the square root of the total number of players P, that is .[21] With a simulation, they confirmed that 50 mafiosi would have almost a 50% chance to win among 10,000. The Mafia's chance of victory is,which is a good approximation when the right hand side is below 40%. If any detectives are added to the game, Braverman et al. proved that the number of mafiosi must remain at a fixed proportion of the total number of players for their chance of winning to remain constant.In 2008, Erlin Yao derived specific analytical bounds for the mafia's win probability when there are no detectives.In a paper from 2010, exact formula for the probability that the mafia wins was found. Moreover, it was shown that the parity of the initial number of players plays an important role. In particular, when the number of mafiosi is fixed and an odd player is added to the game (and ties are resolved by coin flips), the mafia-winning chance do not drop but rise by a factor of approx. (equality in the limit of the infinite number of players).

Basically, zabing12 says he's quitting the zabing12 account because it's in the process of getting banned (he posted this image as offtopic on over 2 dozen threads on forum games) and will be back with a different account.

Basically, zabing12 says he's quitting the zabing12 account because it's in the process of getting banned (he posted this image as offtopic on over 2 dozen threads on forum games) and will be back with a different account.

Because gosh, what better way to make a fresh start for yourself than announce in an incredibly annoying manner that you're going to do just that.

SecondTalon wrote:Oh, wait, no, it's not, because I'm in the fucking Mafia forum reading shit now and want to ban the asshat on principle.

Wait? Someone goes on a Spamming rampage ruining lots of games in the process and moderation wants them banned??

That just...

Reasonable.

Seriously, I usually play devil's advocate here, but zabing12's actions went beyond that: He joined some games as player, and now those games will have to replace them, and he started to mod games, gathered players, and then abandoned them.

In the post that can't no longer be seen he said that he had created his backup account in case this happened, since long time ago, as if doing all this was his plan all along.

Also, can a moderator move this thread to Forum Games? DuplicateFeline was taking over as new moderator of the game, but this is not a mafia game so my guess is it'd fit better there.

Well, at least I predicted that when Zabing was back with his new account, that it was going to be obvious who he was, because, I don't recall ever seeing someone managing to do it (I was a mod on the Rybka Forums for 5 years, we had several problematic members that kept getting banned and coming back, with new IPs and all, and their problem was remaining problematic and being given away, once in trouble, always in trouble) - though, now that I think about it, if someone successfully managed to get a new account and start from scratch without anybody noticing, by definition I couldn't know about it, so, heh, who knows?

Actually, I knew zabing in Epicmafia. He must have got his forum avatar from my epicmafia account. I even Pmed him about it. I was joking in my post about taking from the list, mainly because I knew this would happen and I love breaking suspicions.

Also, he said he made the account about the same time he made his account, so can't we just look at the people who joined when he joined?

Sure, sure, I think that would pass "beyond reasonable doubt" in trial.

You know what would be really cool? If SPACKlick was actually zabing! This thing with he accusing you of being him would make it obvious that he's not zabing, even though he is, allowing him to live forever after without suspicion.

Though, this theory doesn't fly well because of SPACKlick's past on the forum and join date, and all that. It'd still boggle the mind, almost as much as me revealing I was zabing all along.

What I love about the whole case is that this is like a real life game of mafia, DuplicateFeline is either town (he's being truthful, and it makes sense because it would be zabing who stole his avatar) or mafia (he's zabing and wants us to believe otherwise with a straight face), except we can't lynch him and see him flip.

Will the real zabing please stand up appear with an account that makes it obvious it's him back so that DuplicateFeline is exonerated? And if that happens, will DuplicateFeline have done that as a ruse so people believed THAT was zabing so it couldn't be him?

I'd assume zabing doesn't actually want us to figure out who he is on his new account, so lying about when he created it would be a step towards that, assuming we believe him (i.e. suppose zabing claims he created his account April 1st 2015, and he actually created it April 2nd 2015. Since we have his word that he created it on a different day then we should only have people that registered in April 1st 2015 as suspects and "clean" the rest?)

I don't see why he'd need to be a regular, he'd become more active right before Zabing was banned (ie. at the point zabing suspects he could be banned he uses the alternate account to mesh in, after he's gone the alternate account goes fully active - as opposed to zabing using both accounts for a long time, because he'd have no reason to be a regular on both).

wait a second. Damn, this guy is good. This is exactly what he wanted, and exactly why he staged this on a mafia forum.

He wanted to create a mafia game.

He says he created a new account, but he never does. He waits till someone strolls along, a newcomer that he invited a while ago. Then, he does this little act. what if you make a game where no one is mafia? Where something happens that makes someone look like scum, but no one is? This is that game. He targets a single person and makes them look like himself, like a inverse disguiser, and abandons his ship for another to find. Now comes along the investigators like vytron, curious to find the truth of the matter. he sets up the tracks so well that he even steals my avatar to make it seem like me.Then he sends me a private message saying that I should check out this forum. Damn.

Don't look at that if you don't want to see my overactive imagination. It's kind of embarrassing, haha.